No More Learning

Peace and union, he was to remind
him, serve the interest of the losers, and only the reputation of the
winners. If Vitellius regretted their compact, he ought not to take
arms against Sabinus, whom he had treacherously deceived, and against
Vespasian's son, who was still a mere boy. What was the good of
killing one youth and one old man? He ought rather to march out
against the legions and fight for the empire on the field. The result
of the battle would decide all other questions.

Greatly alarmed, Vitellius replied with a few words in which he tried
to excuse himself and throw the blame on his soldiers. 'I am too
unassuming,' he said, 'to cope with their overpowering impatience. ' He
then warned Martialis to make his way out of the house by a secret
passage, for fear that the soldiers should kill him as an ambassador
of the peace to which they were so hostile. Vitellius himself was not
in a position to issue orders or prohibitions; no longer an emperor,
merely an excuse for war.

Martialis had hardly returned to the Capitol when the furious 71
soldiery arrived. They had no general to lead them: each was a law to
himself. Their column marched at full speed through the Forum and past
the temples overlooking it. Then in battle order they advanced up the
steep hill in front of them, until they reached the lowest gates of
the fortress on the Capitol. In old days there was a series of
colonnades at the side of this slope, on the right as you go up.
Emerging on to the roof of these, the besieged overwhelmed the
Vitellians with showers of stones and tiles.
The attacking party
carried nothing but swords, and it seemed a long business to send for
siege-engines and missiles. So they flung torches into the
nearest[188] colonnade and, following in the wake of the flames, would
have burst through the burnt gates of the Capitol, if Sabinus had not
torn down all the available statues--the monuments of our ancestors'
glory--and built a sort of barricade on the very threshold. They then
tried to attack the Capitol by two opposite approaches, one near the
'Grove of Refuge'[189] and the other by the hundred steps which lead
up to the Tarpeian Rock. This double assault came as a surprise. That
by the Refuge was the closer and more vigorous. Nothing could stop the
Vitellians, who climbed up by some contiguous houses built on to the
side of the hill, which in the days of prolonged peace had been raised
to such a height that their roofs were level with the floor of the
Capitol. It is uncertain whether the buildings at this point were
fired by the assailants or--as tradition prefers--by the besieged in
trying to dislodge their enemies who had struggled up so far. The fire
spread to the colonnades adjoining the temples, and then the
'eagles'[190] supporting the roof, which were made of very old wood,
caught the flames and fed them. And so the Capitol, with its doors
fast shut, undefended and unplundered, was burnt to the ground.

Since the foundation of the city no such deplorable and horrible 72
disaster had ever befallen the people of Rome. It was no case of
foreign invasion. Had our own wickedness allowed, the country might
have been enjoying the blessings of a benign Providence; and yet here
was the seat of Jupiter Almighty--the temple solemnly founded by our
ancestors as the pledge of their imperial greatness, on which not even
Porsenna,[191] when Rome surrendered, nor the Gauls, when they took
it, had ever dared to lay rash hands--being brought utterly to ruin by
the mad folly of two rival emperors! [192] The Capitol had been burnt
before in civil war,[193] but that was the crime of private persons.
Now it had been openly assaulted by the people of Rome and openly
burnt by them. And what was the cause of war? what the recompense for
such a disaster?